How-To Geek

Quickly finding the fastest USB port may seem complicated, what with the sheer number of USB ports modern motherboards and cases are packing, but it's actually fairly simple. Just follow the advice below, and you'll locate the fastest USB port on your PC in a jiff.

It's not an exaggeration to say that the original PlayStation is my favorite console of all time, and that's not just driven by when I was born. In fact, I'm a bigger fan of the PS1 now than when it was contemporary. This console stands tall in history purely on the strength of its game catalog, but there's something it has in common with the PlayStations that followed, which also helped cement its future.

3D printers are a feat of modern engineering. Yet, somehow, 3D printers have one major problem that has yet to be solved: they poop. I think a poop bucket (or poop chute) is one of, if not the most essential 3D printing upgrade you’ll ever make—here’s why.

Our modern internet is fast—really fast. Personally, I've been enjoying Gigabit internet speeds for a few years now, a far cry from the 33.6Kbps internet connection I started out on in the late '90s.

The Toyota Corolla Cross Hybrid gets lost in a sea of oversized SUVs, turbo badges, and headline-grabbing , even though it makes way more sense for most people. With new car prices hovering around $50,000, “big and flashy” isn’t exactly realistic for everyday buyers anymore.

Docker is the heart of my homelab—I couldn’t run the services that I do, in the ways that I do, without it. Throughout the years I’ve likely ran well over 100 containers, if not many more. Through the trials and testing, I’ve found that some containers are here to stay, and some I had to let go of.

If you’ve been 3D printing for more than a few weeks, you’ve probably decided—at least once—that your printer is the problem. The machine is cheap. The firmware is bad. The manufacturer cut corners. Something must be wrong, because your print just failed again.

Most Python programmers have a common reason to love the language. It lets you get more done with less code. Over time, this leads to a culture of “why write ten lines if one will do?” Let's look at a few everyday programming tasks and see how Python can compress them into elegant one-liners.

Romance is in the air, and Valentine's Day weekend has officially arrived. Apple TV celebrated a little early by adding the most enticing fantasy romantic comedy of 2025, Eternity, which enjoyed a moderately successful run in theaters late last year. Eternity is a tale of a woman who must choose between two men to spend her afterlife with. It's surprisingly sweet and clever, but there are plenty of other fantasy rom-coms out there to enjoy if Eternity doesn't fill the quota.

As an experienced coder or a newcomer learning your first programming language, setting up your development environment can be tricky. Let me show you how I put together the perfect Linux programming platform using VS Code and containers.

It’s 2026 and, for some reason, I still have to use third-party tools to access my computers remotely—except for my Raspberry Pi. It seems the cheap single board computers are more technologically advanced than my high-end MacBook Pro or Windows desktops, and I’m not sure why that’s still the case.

Even though modern game consoles demand fast solid state storage for playing games, they can still use external hard drives and SSDs for archive storage and other features. If you have an old drive you’re not using, it might be a great upgrade for your console.

Google Home is one of the big players in the smart home world, offering cross-platform support for a large number of devices at a reasonable price point. Though there are many reasons that you might turn to Google for your smart home needs, there are a few uncomfortable truths that are worth acknowledging.

Android apps are required to ask for permission to access your photos, track your steps, read notifications, and much more. Some Permissions have a bigger impact on your phone’s performance than others. There are three, in particular, that shouldn’t be granted willy-nilly.

Recently I needed to set up a publicly available form. I didn't want to use Google Docs, and I don't have enough web development skills to build my own and deploy it securely. That's why I ended up using an alternative: CryptPad.

This was another busy week in tech, with Discord making everyone upset, Sony's long-awaited WF-1000XM6 earbuds, YouTube TV launching new cheaper plans, and much more. Here are the biggest stories you might have missed.

Bash, and other shells like zsh, support several test operators that you can use to check conditions: whether something is a file, or if one number is larger than another, for example. These tests are very useful and will likely feature in most shell scripts you write.

Modern cars are packed with technology that promises to make driving safer, easier, and more convenient. Touchscreens manage climate control, cameras guide parking, and sensors warn us of obstacles we can’t see. Yet despite all this innovation, the most-used and most practical tool in my car didn’t come from a dealership or an electronics store. It came from a supermarket aisle and cost me just two dollars: a simple towel.

Thread is the hot new low-power mesh network in the smart home world, with IKEA recently adopting it for a new range of Matter devices. But even though Thread is the future, Zigbee still gets my personal pick for the present. Let me explain.

This weekend I'm going to start using a new distro on the secondary disk drive on my Linux laptop. It's one that had escaped my notice for a long time, but I was pretty sure I'd struck gold when I saw it.